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Old 03-31-2022, 06:38 PM
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JollyElm JollyElm is offline
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"Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Collectorisms-man!!"

I present to you 2022's Collectorisms Part X - Section 3 of 3


"Never trust a card collector who says he isn't angry..."


582. Tacticalculus
Quickly crunching the numbers to determine if the price of an ungraded card is a good deal, based on what its value would be if it came back from a TPG at the grade it ‘unquestionably deserves.’

583. Freewheeler-Dealer (also Shopcreeper)
Someone who contributes nothing to the site and is only here to continually tally up sales by peddling their cards in the B/S/T marketplace without having to worry about paying fees to do so.

See also: Vulture Club - a group of such members.

584. Lessing in Disguise
When purchasing a card outside of eBay or an auction house, the wonderful surprise of finding that tax isn’t being added to the final price at check-out.

585. Data Maligning
The refusal to believe or accept that the low price numbers of the past sales statistics you are looking at truly reflect how little your card is ‘worth.’

586. Clapprehension
When someone excitedly posts a new pick-up, but since you are unfamiliar with the card, the set or the player, you have no idea how big your reaction should be.

587. Timefoolery
Running across an old ad or catalog for ‘The Card Collector's Company’ (or other such places) from the 60’s or 70’s and immediately getting lost in imagining how great it would be to go back in time and buy up everything at those incredible prices.

588. Grass Half Empty
Any card or photograph which allows you to catch a glimpse of how awful the field conditions got back in the old days.

589. Upshelfing
When a seller describes a graded card using verbiage such as “Only 15 higher!!” in an attempt to give it some sort of additional prominence it doesn’t deserve.

See also: Glampifying - romanticizing a pile of old cards in bad shape for sale by referring to them as being in “Collector’s Grade.”

590. Slit-Talker
Someone who is well-schooled in the ways that vintage card print sheets were organized, laid out with SP’s and DP’s, and ultimately cut.

See also: Chompromised - cards that due to the detrimental positions they occupied on the print sheets, are much more susceptible to being found very off-centered, short side-to-side, or generally miscut due to the sheet cutting process.

591. Incrementarian
Someone who habitually adds a specific number of cents to each of his bids (i.e. $18.44, $72.44, $109.44), so it'll give him a better chance of beating out standard, whole dollar amount bidders.

592. Socialrelist
A seller who after no one pulls the trigger on his high price, decides to relist the card at an even higher Buy-It-Now amount.

593. Die-Hardcore Collector
A guy who would enthusiastically crawl through broken glass as he battled terrorists if it meant he had a chance of getting his hands on a card he dearly wants.

594. Sticker Sorrow
The depressing feeling of getting an auction win in the mail and the price tag on the toploader (that obviously held the card for a long time as it sat unsold in the seller’s card shop) is a lot less than what you just paid for it.

595. Stackedcourt (also Hofrequency)
The regularity with which two or more Hall of Famers appear as co-stars on action-packed vintage basketball cards.

596. Smaller Famer
Someone trying to grab big-money, top-tier Hall of Famers off of you through offering trades where he only surrenders cards of low-demand HOF’ers.

597. Subdueling
Choosing not to ‘watch’ an auction you’re very interested in, because keeping the number of watchers low might give you an advantage by making others think the number of potential bidders is less than it really is.

See also: The Ole Yazz-A-Ma-Tazz - purposely using slight, subtle misspellings of a player’s name in an eBay search, in the hopes of running across something great where no one else is looking.

598. Upper-Deke
A seller fervently touting how his lot contains all sorts of valuable high numbers, but it's a fake-out as those cards are either in horrific shape or they’re from a set where the high series isn’t in any way, shape or form tough to obtain.

599. Reboot Lickers
Fans of the modern day sets whose designs are throwback reproductions of cards from long ago.

600. Pornucopia
Any pictures of random, jumbled assortments of old baseball cards.

601. Amass Hysteria
Having the so-called ‘collector’ gene, where the act of accumulating cards (and/or other collectibles) is not only second nature, but a very important part of your life.

See also: Ebayla Virus (or Hyperbuycemia) - the malady of consistently spending so much money purchasing new pieces for your collection that it adversely affects other parts of your life.

See also: Gaffe Infection - plagued by the need to accumulate whatever error and variation cards you can get your hands on.

See also: Crossovertigo - the disorder causing you to not be able to see straight unless each graded card you obtain is cracked out of its slab and resubmitted to your preferred TPG.

See also: Back Lung Disease - the uncontrollable urge to continue adding ‘new’ and different tobacco card backs to your collection.

See also: Winsomnia - being unable to sleep due to the need to press on and make it to the end of an auction finishing up in the wee hours of the morning.

See also: Hallstones - the pain in your gut that results from stressing over whether your bid in an auction for a Hall of Famer will remain high enough to win the card.

See also: Hero-Win Addict - a person hooked on collecting a specific player, and always striving to prevail in auctions to grab more and more examples of his cards.

602. Slop-Happy
A card that puts a smile on your face, because although it is in godawfully bad shape, it has the saving grace of being perfectly centered.

See also: Malificentered - when the centering of a card is so garishly awful it hurts your brain.

603. Not Not Joke
Any auction for a card that is obviously a reprint or fantasy piece, but the seller cunningly includes some sort of “I’m not sure if this card is real or not...” verbiage to try to pull the wool over someone’s eyes.

604. Easy Come, Easy Dough (adage)
How incredibly easy it is for TPGs to grade new cards, since they are of extremely high quality to begin with, and go straight from the pack into card savers and then submitted...without the chance of ever suffering wear.

605. Accoladyboys
Kids who chased cards with the ‘All-Star Rookie’ trophies on them, because their young minds believed Topps considered those guys to be the best players around.

606. Perplexistentialism
If a card has a ST qualifier on the label, but no matter how hard you examine it you can’t locate the supposed stain, does said stain actually exist??

607. Flopps (also Bottomms (archaic))
The particular Topps set or sets that each individual collector feels are just a big swing and a miss.

608. Lens Denter (also Helmet Bonker)
A picture on a card that is such an extreme close-up that you can imagine the camera actually coming in contact with the player.

609. Barrage Sale
When someone posts way too many separate FS threads, instead of combining them.

610. Membeer Goggles
When someone claims the stuff he is selling is ‘beautiful,’ when everyone can see the cards are anything but pretty to look at.

611. A Pounce of Prevention
When a card for sale somewhere is just too good to be true, and members immediately jump in to call people’s attention to all of the red flags while warning them to be very, very careful about pursuing it.

612. Unwanted Posters
Manager and coaches cards, because 99.9% of all collectors have nothing but contempt for them and wish some other types of cards were printed in their place.

613. Dread Giveaway
When seeking out opinions on whether or not the expensive card you bought is authentic, and someone points out a specific aspect that 100% proves it is NOT genuine.

614. “Healthy as a Hearse” (aphorism)
The ambivalence of realizing that when an all-time great dies, the great sadness you feel is counterbalanced by the skyrocketing value of the cards you have of him in your collection.

615. Poll Vaulting
Clicking the “View Poll Results” button in a thread to see which way the wind is blowing before actually voting in said poll.

616. High-Grade Low-Brow
Vintage sets where it is very easy to obtain cards cheaply in extremely high grades.

617. Fleermonger
A collector and enthusiast of any vintage Fleer sets.

See also: Cookie Mistake - how Fleer’s 1963 attempt to issue a set of cards featuring current players crumbled under the weight of Topps’ supremacy.

618. PSA 10 OC (slang)
A colorful way of telling someone that their card is a fake. “Yo, dude, that Matty is a 10 OC all the way!”

619. Dem Sums
Any valuable Brooklyn Dodgers cards.

See also: Ebbetts Yield - the increased value of the 1957 Topps #400 Dodgers Sluggers’ card if Carl Furillo ever finds his way into Cooperstown.

620. Reflection Deflection
Using pics of a card still in a penny sleeve or toploader, so the rippled reflections of light off of the plastic obscures issues that would be readily apparent if the card was photographed or scanned outside of the holder.

621. Might O’ Dayers
The lurkers who may consider coming out of the shadows and becoming more ‘fully-fledged’ net54 members and contributors.

622. Brothers-in-Lore
Scammers in the B/S/T who all seem to tell the same story of having siblings with incredible collections that need to be unloaded quickly and cheaply.

623. Brookskeeper
A spirited collector of all things Brooks Robinson.

624. Scambling
Being unsure of whether or not a valuable card is authentic, but rolling the dice and sending it in to be graded anyway, because if it turns out to be real you’ll be rolling in the dough.

625. March Fadness
How the market for a certain emerging player’s rookie cards gets all bonkers with the dawn of the season approaching...only to start losing steam as the season gets under way and he proves to be nothing special.

626. Gripe Left
When a member complains about there being a lack of interest in the attractively-priced (to him) card he’s selling by remarking, “What, no offers??”

627. Single-A Haul
Any pick-up that is great for you, personally, but in the scheme of things may be rather yawn-worthy.

628. Blisstory
The warm retellings of when, where and/or how you picked up a specific card or cards a long time ago.

629. Batsmanalysis
Trying to interpret the subtle clues and determine what old team’s uniform a player is wearing on a card where all team logos and insignias have been either obscured or airbrushed into oblivion by the card company due to a team switch.

See also: Trade-Scoff (or Sigh-Gration) - the godawfully poor job of airbrushing done to the ‘new’ caps of relocated players on vintage ‘traded set’ cards.

630. Farced Perspective
A seller taking a picture of an off-centered card at an angle with the ‘very close to the border’ side in the foreground, giving the illusion that there’s a lot more room there than there actually is.

631. “Fly Me to the Boon”
When a card you saw on eBay (and know how much it sold for) suddenly appears for sale on net54 at two or three times the price it went for merely a week ago.

632. Free Blurred
The use of “FREE SHIPPING!” in an auction title in an attempt to obscure the fact it is a tremendously overpriced card.

633. Half-Ask Effort
When someone posts a WTB thread, but doesn’t include any fundamentally basic information such as what condition they are seeking, etc.

634. Lagflation
When a seller’s prices before the pandemic were stupidly high, but since he hasn’t done a show in a couple of years, the old price stickers on his toploaders remain unchanged and now make the cards look like sweet bargains in today’s market.

See also: Deantrification - when the stupidly high prices of an eBayer seller seem a tiny bit more reasonable to some people, because everyone else’s wildly skyrocketing prices have lessened the gap.

635. Show-Flopper
Buying a graded card at a show, because you thought the price was a steal, but when you got home and checked out the listings on eBay, you saw it could be readily had for half of what you paid.


And that's the end of section 3, so I hope you guys enjoyed it!! (Whoops!! Since I'm not a biologist, I don't actually know if you are "guys.")
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Overpaying yesterday is simply underpaying tomorrow.

Last edited by JollyElm; 10-20-2023 at 03:06 PM.
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